As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
As the capabilities of information handling systems have improved, the power requirements of information handling systems and their component information handling resources have increased. Accordingly, the amount of heat produced by such information handling resources has increased. Because the electrical properties of information handling resources may be adversely affected by the presence of heat (e.g., heat may damage sensitive information handling resources and/or some information handling resources may not operate correctly outside of a particular range of temperatures), information handling systems often include cooling systems configured to cool such information handling resources.
The construction and configuration of cooling systems may be of particular difficulty in data centers. A data center will typically include multiple information handling systems (e.g., servers), which may be arranged in racks. Each information handling system and its component information handling resources may generate heat, which can adversely affect the various information handling systems and their component information handling resources if not efficiently removed or reduced.
To cool information handling systems in data centers, information handling systems are often cooled via the impingement of air driven by one or more air movers. To effectively control the temperature of information handling resources, especially in installations in which a modular data center is outdoor-exposed (e.g., those placed on building roofs or elsewhere) and 100% outside-air cooled, the modular data center must provide support for extreme temperatures, weather, and airflow ranges.
In addition, it is often critical to exhaust air from the data center after the air has cooled the information handling systems (in the process increasing heat in such air). In outdoor-exposed data centers (e.g., those placed on building roofs or elsewhere outdoors in which a building super structure is not present around the exhaust module in order to act as a chimney or fluid boundary), provisioning for such exhaust may present even greater challenges, as the exhaust module must operate in environmental conditions that may include rains, winds, ice, dust, pollen, snow, and other environmental particulates and must effectively prevent small animals from entering the exhaust module, all the while not impeding air flow from the exhaust and allowing discharge of water and debris from the exhaust module. In addition, another challenge to provisioning of a data center is to reduce or avoid re-entrainment of exhausted air back into the cooling system.